Incredible Petrified World, The (1959)

... aka: El mundo increíble (The Amazing World)
... aka: Le monde pétrifié (The Petrified World)

Directed by:
Jerry Warren

Like any other low budget 50s horror / sci-fi flick worth its grain in schlock, this opens with five minutes of narrated stock footage. We see the roaring ocean, an octopus and shark fighting and then a bunch of regular ole fish doing their thing. "We are now prepared to invade this black wilderness," says the monotone voice-over. Well, I was actually already prepared five minutes ago but thanks for your concern. After a few men at a private screening discuss the money and time sunk into ocean exploration, we're whisked off to somewhere in the Caribbean where Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) is preparing to test out his new diving bell, which should instead be renamed a "diving ball" because of its completely circular shape. Because both his peers and investors alike had no faith in what he was trying to accomplish, Wyman was forced to finance this project all on his own. Meaning, his reputation and pocketbook are both about to take a big hit.

Wyman's aluminum beach ball is slated to go "deeper than any man has ever gone before" so that a small group of explorers can see what exists "thousands of feet" below the surface. Since Wyman is already up there in age, he enlists four others to take the plunge in his place. There's ambitious, catty and cone-bra'd "lady reporter" Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coats), who's just received a Dear Joan letter from her estranged husband, oceanographers Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor) and Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan), both former students of Wyman's, and scientist Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), the newest addition to their research team. Everyone is high in spirit and enthusiasm as the flimsy tin death trap is lowered into the water, but those good times won't be lasting much longer for our four-person crew.

Once they are 1700 feet below the surface, there's a glitch in the electricity, radio contact is lost and the cable lowering the contraption snaps, dropping the bell deep into the recesses of the unknown. Professor Wyman tries to stave off the obligatory bad press while fellow scientist J.R. Matheny (George Skaff), who's planning his own rival diving bell expedition with a different model designed by Professor Wyman's brother, Jim (Joe Maierhauser), keep tabs on what's going on and put their own planned underwater expedition on indefinite hiatus. Meanwhile, the crew, who passed out during the fall, finally awaken on what they first assume is the ocean floor. After a hysterical Dale has to be slapped back into reality, the group soon realize they're actually somewhere else entirely. They can see light through their porthole, which wouldn't be the case had they floated all the way down. And, well, they're still alive when they should be dead from the pressure increase.

The team throw on their diving gear and air tanks and head out to see where the light is coming from. They end up in an elaborate cave system, filled with countless tunnels illuminated by phosphorous. Pools of potable water are around and there's plenty of access to fresh seafood so at least their basic needs are met while they wait for help. Back on the main ship, Carradine and company have resigned themselves to the fate of their friends and are only hanging around nearby to potentially retrieve their corpses from the water. Radio operator Wilson (Lloyd Nelson) picks up what he believes to be the missing party on his sonar but his observations are all but ignored. Instead, Wyman discovers why his diving bell didn't work properly and goes to Matheny about possibly making adjustments to his diving bell so he can make a second attempt at underwater exploration.

By now, the four lost explorers have given up hope they'll be rescued. They use up most of their oxygen tanks making trips back to the diving bell to retrieve whatever may be useful for their long life living in the caves. They stumble across a big lizard, a human skeleton and, finally, a delirious, bug-eyed old man (Maurice Bernard) in a terrible wig and fake beard who claims to have been trapped down there for fourteen long years. As for why there's breathable air and clean water all the way down there, it's because they're situated somewhere underneath a movie volcano that only decides to become active when it's convenient for the plot. None of the new information raises morale or hope they'll ever make it back to the surface. With miles and miles of caves that are incredibly easy to get lost in, how will they ever be able to navigate themselves out of there?

This is actually pretty good for a Jerry Warren film which means it's still pretty bad but could have been a whole lot worse. The poster writes a check ("Terror!" / "Monsters!") the film can't cash and the science elements are dated and ridiculous as is usually the case for this era, but the premise itself I quite liked. However, the budget isn't there to do much with it and there's not nearly enough plot to sustain things. In lieu of that, we get lots of talking and wandering around plus lots of cuts back to the surface where more people sit around talking. As far as drama and tension are concerned, the Dale character acts a bit bitchy at times, Craig and Lauri reveal their love for one another and the voyeuristic caveman falls for Dale and hopes she'll agree to his plan to kill off the others so they can have the cave all to themselves.

Despite the cheapness of the production, they filmed the underground scenes at Colossal Caves in Tucson, Arizona so at least those "sets" are convincing. There's also something unexpectedly lovely and (accidentally) poetic about the long diving scenes thanks to overbearing overhead lighting, bubbles and reflective surfaces mixed with ethereal stock music and the grainy black-and-white photography.

Brianne Murphy, Warren's wife at the time and co-owner of their company GBM Productions, was the production supervisor (as "G.B. Murphy") and dialogue director. She and Warren can also be spotted riding an airplane with Carradine. This was filmed in 1957 but not released until a few years later on a double with Warren's awful TEENAGE ZOMBIES. The budget is said to be a paltry 15,000 dollars (!), with 2K of that going to Carradine for two day's work and another chunk of it spent on making a rubber monster suit that they ended up not even using! The full running time is 66 minutes and the film is in the public domain so it's been released by a whole slew of labels on both VHS and DVD over the years.

★1/2

Bermuda Triangle, The (1978)

... aka: Devil's Triangle of Bermuda
... aka: Mystere du Triangle des Bermudes, Le
... aka: Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, The
... aka: Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle
... aka: Triangle: The Bermuda Mystery
... aka: Triangolo delle Bermude, Il
... aka: Triángula diabólico de las Bermudas, El

Directed by:
René Cardona Jr.

The Bermuda Triangle is an unspecified area of water in the Atlantic Ocean where an unusually-high number of airplanes and ships were said to have mysteriously disappeared over the years. It covers between 500,000 and 1.5 million square miles depending on who you ask and some authors have defined the area's points as stretching from around Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico on over to the island of Bermuda and back to Florida, but not all stick by this definition. The Bermuda Triangle legend began back in 1950 with an article in the Miami Herald newspaper, and subsequent sensationalist articles claiming supernatural forces may somehow be at play quickly followed suit. These helped establish the various legends that the area was somehow cursed or haunted, and some even went so far as to assert that it was controlled by aliens! These claims and the poorly-researched early articles have long since been debunked by researchers, authors, scientists, insurance companies and members of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Like so many other legends, it's a fun thing to think about until fact crashes the party. In reality, there has not been a larger-than-usual amount of planes and ships to vanish in the Bermuda Triangle than there has been anywhere else. It's one of those things that's been ingrained in our subconscious despite the fact it's an unsubstantiated hoax comparable to Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Amityville haunting and numerous other oddities some people continue to believe are real simply because they want to.

The Bermuda Triangle legend reached its peak in popularity in the 1970s and various films were made to cash in. Richard Winer's documentary The Devil's Triangle (1974), narrated by Vincent Price, led the way and was followed by the made for TV movies Satan's Triangle (1975), directed by Sutton Roley and starring Kim Novak, and Beyond the Bermuda Triangle (1975), this theatrical release (an Italian / Mexican co-production), Richard Friedenberg's documentary The Bermuda Triangle (1979) and numerous others. Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which made mention of the alien theory, helped ensure the Triangle legend was known to the masses. Other films, like The Bermuda Depths (1978) and Bermuda: Cave of the Sharks (1978), didn't care so much about the legend, but didn't mind using the Bermuda name to help sell tickets. Since the 70s, movies have been produced in each decade about the Triangle. Some examples include Lost in the Bermuda Triangle (1998), the TV miniseries The Triangle (2005) and Beneath the Bermuda Triangle (2007). And this isn't scratching the surface if you want to list movies making mention of it, movies influenced by it or all of the TV programs devoted to the particular topic.

Expert diver and photographer Edward Marvin (71-year-old John Huston, who is way too old for this role) charters the boat the Black Whale in his quest to discover the lost city of Atlantis (another popular theory floated around by Triangle conspiracy theorists). He brings along his wife Kim (Marina Vlady, who was 30+ years Huston's junior), his teenage children Michelle (hot blonde Gloria Guida) and Dave ("Al Coster" / René Cardona III aka the director's son) and younger kids Billy (Andrés Garcia Jr.) and Diane (Gretha). Edward's half-brother Peter (Carlos East), a drunk, obnoxious former doctor who lost his desire to practice after accidentally killing a child during an operation, and his miserable wife Sybil (Claudine Auger) are also around for the unpleasant cruise, which is about to become even more unpleasant. While way out at sea in the Bermuda Triangle, Diane discovers a creepy old doll floating in the water. It's fished out, given to her and is soon whispering in her ear that it wants raw meat to eat. Soon enough, Diane becomes possessed, starts acting weird, gets flogged by a bunch of green parrots that promptly fall over dead with broken necks and begins obsessively talking about death.

Some of the family members go diving and stumble upon a bunch of underwater ruins which may be Atlantis. Some pillars fall and crush Michelle's legs; critically injuring her in the process. Diane has some questions about the black cook (Jorge Zamora), so she asks her mommy, "What color would Simon be when he dies? Purple or white?" More like red when he's found dead in a puddle of blood after his throat is cut with a broken bottle. Some mysterious bouts of bad weather come their way and a wave sweeps Edward and Kim out to sea. Superstitious Gordon (Miguel Ángel Fuentes), who works in the boiler room, insists the doll be destroyed but no one listens and he gets chopped up by the boat's propeller. Captain Mark Briggs (Hugo Stiglitz) and his right hand man Alan (Andrés Garcia) attempt to get them to the island of Bimini but various problems keep them from going anywhere and a strange static interference prevents them from radioing anywhere for help. Will the survivors be able to escape, or will they become the latest in a long line to disappear without a trace?

No explanation for the mysterious occurrences is ever given here, which is fine by me, but the poor handling of this material is not OK. Potentially eerie moments are continually botched by poor directorial choices and inept editing and pacing. The characters are mostly either cardboard or flat-out unpleasant, and they're not made any better by English-language dubbing so bad and so lacking in infliction that lines like "Would you like a cup of coffee?" and "Oh my God!! She's dead!!" come out sounding exactly the same. The script is bland and plodding, the dialogue is terrible, the film lurches along very slowly for nearly two hours and it's so light on violence (everything pretty much takes place off-screen) that one suspects this was made for a family audience. That's all a shame, too, because this is actually reasonably produced and features decent photography (including some nice underwater work) and an atmospheric score from Stelvio Cipriani.

Bermuda was filmed around the same time as Cardona's TINTORERA (1977) and TERROR STORM (1978), both of which also have ocean settings, shark scenes (three real sharks are needlessly harpooned and killed in this film, which seemed to be one of the director's unfortunate preoccupations at the time) and feature cast members Stiglitz, Garcia and East. Top-billed Huston really isn't given much to do. This was made during a strange chapter in the multiple Oscar-winning filmmaker's career which also saw roles in other low-brow films like the killer octopus flick Tentacles (1977) and the Exorcist / Omen cash-in The Visitor (1979).

★1/2